Accelerating Metronome

About

Most metronomes only keep a tempo. This one accelerates gradually while you play, and remembers every minute you practice. Accelerating Metronome is a practice instrument, built by a working musician in Seattle over forty years of daily practice. This is not what a product committee would have asked for. THE METRONOME A rotary dial you drag with your thumb, the way a hardware tempo wheel works. 40 to 232 BPM across the traditional 42 settings. Fine at slow tempos where small changes matter, coarser at fast ones where they do not. Three voices: a woodblock that cuts through loud instruments, a pitched bar chime that sits under quiet playing, and a cowbell that plows through anything. Set the beats to a bar and the downbeat takes a voice of its own. A tuning reference from 440 to 445, and reference pitches for Standard and New Standard tuning. TAP TEMPO Tap the knot in the dial in time, and the tempo changes to what you tap. THE ACCELERATOR Choose a beginning tempo, a target, and how long you want to practice. It climbs on its own, in steps, so you invest your time playing rather than reaching for the dial. It tells you what is coming: the next tempo, how many bars away it is, and how long is left. When it reaches the target it holds there and keeps going, and that extra time is counted separately as play time. Practice and playing are not the same thing. And are not counted as if they were. Save and name your own Custom Ramps. PEAK SPEED Mark the tempo where you hit a wall and you have a record that grows. We graph your peak speeds so you can see your progress. SPIN THE METRONOME Press this and let the Universe choose a tempo for you. Practicing only at the tempos you like is how blind spots appear. And this is the cure. Spin the Metronome before a Group Rehearsal to bring everyone into listening and warming up together beginning with a cue from the Muse. YOUR PRACTICE, VISUALIZED OVER TIME Every session is documented: when, how long, which tempos, and what you were working on. Name your own categories and each one takes a color. The calendar shows a month at a glance, one circle per day, filling clockwise. A quarter turn for every fifteen minutes, gold and a number after you have completed a full hour of practice. A Streak counts the days in a row you practiced, because momentum may motivate you to pick up the instrument on an evening you had decided not to. And practice more than an hour every day from Sunday to Saturday and the whole week is celebrated in gold. All seven days have to surpass an hour. The value is in consistency rather than celebrating any single day: where the gaps fall, which day of the week you always lose, whether the good stretch you remember was three weeks or nine days. AUDIO THAT MIXES The click plays over (or under) your music, a podcast, or a backing track without interrupting them. The iPhone silent switch does not mute it. It keeps going when you switch apps or the screen locks, and so does the Accelerator. The beats sit on the audio hardware's clock rather than on a timer, so nothing drifts while you are not looking. Optional haptics help you feel the beat through the phone. The screen stays awake while it plays. One setting doubles the click volume. YOURS, AND PRIVATE No account, no login, no shared analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no subscription. You buy it once. Your practice history is on your phone and nothing is sent anywhere. You can back it up to your own Files or iCloud Drive whenever you like, in a plain file you can read. It works entirely offline, always. You can import it onto a new device. Portrait or landscape. 1,163 quotes on practice and music appear between sessions, from Steve Ball, from Guitar Craft, and from Steve Turnidge. A free web version with reduced features runs in any browser at steveball.com/metronome. The app is a premium way to experience a rich practice tool as a native app. This is accelerating practice you can finally visualize over time.